how to install mencoder in ubuntu 14.10?
Step 1: download the Ubuntu 14.04 .deb file from http://pkgs.org/download/mencoder. If you used dpkg at this point to install this, you would run into dependency problems. Specifically, the packages libavcodec54, libavcodec-extra-54, libavformat54, libavutil52 and libswscale2 may not be installed on your system. However, you may have newer packages installed, or there may be newer packages available, that provide the same functionality. Therefore, we are going to modify the .deb file.
Step 2: find out what versions of these packages are already installed on your system:
apt-cache policy libavcodec*
(and likewise for the other packages) will tell you that. If none is installed, but one is available, say libavcodec56 has an installation candidate, install it (sudo apt-get install libavcodec56). Make a note of the version, i.e. the last two digits, of each package. Note, however, that you need either libavcodec54 or libavcodec-extra-54, not both.
Step 3: download a script called videbcontrol. It is available from here. You want to make it executable; and if you don't like vi you may edit the script, find the line that uses vi (line 35 of the current script), and change that to nano or any other preferred editor.
Step 4: run the videbcontrol script against the deb file:
videbcontrol mencoder_1.1+dfsg1_0ubuntu3_amd64.deb
Or whichever deb file you have downloaded. (You may need to specify path names here, but you don't need sudo). This will open the deb's control file. In it you will find a line with "Depends on:" listing the packages that I mentioned in Step 1. Now carefully replace the version numbers with the ones that you have actually installed in Step 2. Closing the editor will save the .deb file als a .modified.deb file.
Step 5: Install the modified .deb file using sudo dpkg -i mencoder[version].modified.deb . Hopefully, all the dependencies will be satisfied at this point.
Incidentally, this is how I installed the nixnote2 beta on my system, with more or less the same dependencies.